This is a rebuild and expansion of my article on The Beginner’s Guide from back in 2018, with a newly developed thesis about authenticity and access to artists.
And below is the script I worked from!
The Beginner’s Guide
The Beginner’s Guide is an interactive storytelling video game created by Davey Wreden under the studio name Everything Unlimited Ltd. The game was released for Linux, OS X, and Windows on October 1, 2015. The game is Wreden’s follow-up to the critically praised The Stanley Parable, his previous interactive storytelling title that was initially released in 2013.
The game is narrated by Wreden and takes the user through a number of incomplete and abstract game creations made by a developer named Coda. Wreden challenges the player to try to come to understand the type of person Coda is from exploring these spaces in a first-person perspective. Wreden has stated the game is open to interpretation: some have seen the game as general commentary on the nature of the relationship between game developers and players, while others have taken it as an allegory to Wreden’s own personal struggles with success resulting from The Stanley Parable. When the game sold, a reviewer – at least one, but I can’t find records of more than that – made a bit of a stir by suggesting that the fiction presented in the game is true, and that therefore, the game was built out of stolen material, and gamers buying it could hypothetically, get it refunded if they felt that were in any kind of moral quandrary.
This is, as best I understand it, the ‘story’ of The Beginner’s Guide, the entity in media, the confluence of reporting and reactions to a game. And now, in that same disjointed way of The Beginner’s Guide, I want to tell you about s1m0ne.
S1M0NE, stylised however you wanna, is a 2002 Al Pacino movie about a dude who creates a virtual actress. That’s not even how the movie goes in full, it’s way more involved than that and it includes bestiality, and it has this nasty kind of undercurrent about the fundamentally exploitable nature of women in media spaces. It’s an interesting film.
I didn’t say good.
Anyway, the thing is S1M0NE’s central premise is the virtual actress, Simone. In-movie, she doesn’t exist. To reinforce this, she isn’t credited as having an actress. The movie does do an extensive cgi sequence, showing Simone being constructed digitally, but it was… let’s say it’s very 2002, and leave it at that. Anyway, a bunch of people including representatives from the Screen Actors Guild believed it and they started a fuss about it. I think. It’s hard to find sources about it now, but I remember a fuss.
I mean it stands to reason, if you’re a union you want to oppose things that hurt the interest of your members, and that’s a perfectly valid concern to be worried about around about now with things like deep learning technology allowing us to transplant faces and details across multiple media works and the complex relationship between motion capture and voice actor and fully integrated action – like, if you weren’t aware, motion captured faces are not a 1:1 acting thing, they’re a structure for animators to work from. Gollum is not ‘Andy Serkis is amazing,’ they’re Andy Serkis and the fifty people doing all the rest of the work are amazing, and yes, Andy’s ability to disappear into the role and do the physical acting element is impressive. That’s a real conversation.
But it’s not the conversation they were having in 2002.
There were some people, in late 2002, who genuinely thought that an Al Pacino movie with Winona Ryder and a budget of $10 Million had successfully replicated the human form with complete authenticity, and that the much cheaper and easier tack of using an actor wasn’t more likely. Then they thought it’d involve, y’know, pig-doinking.
Simone was played by a Canadian actress, and the movie otherwise glanced over its very interesting questions of identity and artificiality and technology to instead tell a story about a dude who was very, very anxious about his inability to control women. The real story of the movie, then, is less about what the movie wanted to talk about and much more about the fact some people couldn’t tell where the movie was fiction and where it was fact. The boundary of the diegesis confused people, and there were some critics who were genuinely unsure of how confident they could be about dismissing the fears of people who thought the end of actors had come.
This comparison is because, yeah, it’s kinda stupid that videogame criticism was duped into believing that maybe an author stole all their work and then recorded themselves having a nervous breakdown then edited that nervous breakdown and cleaned up the audio and packaged it up and sold it on Steam without at any point considering that the art was stolen, it’s not like videogames are unique in this regard. We have a history of people not knowing the boundary between art and real and sometimes, when people play with that, especially in areas of new technology, people make mistakes. But also, like, yeah, we are now living in a time when the idea of ‘someone tried to sell entirely stolen assets on steam for $15’ isn’t even a joke or punchline, it might just be a fact of a thing that happens regularly.
As a game experience, The Beginner’s Guide is fine. I like it as a game because it needs the medium of games to make sense, complete with the idea of incomplete games and the way games are made not from a coherent single point but a sort of constantly exploding set of interconnected steps. Like, you couldn’t make this as a book because this isn’t how a book would look when you’re exploring its dismantled bits. The Beginner’s Guide, if it were a book about books and making books, would look like collected pieces of paper in different hands, with a sort of formalising hand over it all.
Funnily enough it’d look a bit like the book of Genesis.
(There’s a long reach of an academic poke)
It’s a perfectly interesting work about imposter syndrome and emotional boundaries and creative processes and a lot of other things you can see in your own inkblots. It’s an artistic piece that tells you a narrative in a really blunt way, but it uses its framing to create a blurred diegesis. It uses real world markers to confuse you about the actuality of its narrative, or it did at the time.
There’s a forking challenge here; on the one hand, I want to berate videogames, as a culture, for being so woefully ill-equipped to deal with meta art as to be convinced that the narrative presented in The Beginner’s Guide was actually real and have at least one actual journalist be so unsure of the reality of the presented narrative as to hedge their bets and mention seemingly unironically that refunds for this game were an option. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re drowning in meta-aware fiction and a cultural discourse that can treat this kind of thing seriously. Since the Stanley Parable and then Beginner’s Guide, the most recent big ‘oh everyone talks about it’ meta-game in my space has been Undertale, and I hate that.
Since the Beginner’s Guide’s original appearance, things have moved on a bit, and particularly, the word ‘parasocial’ has fallen to the common voice. People with platforms use the term to describe the behaviour of people who don’t have platforms, and the people without platforms follow their word, and now ‘parasocial’ has a sort of loose use around it, the idea that it’s pretty much just anything that annoys you about other people on the internet, especially if they’re talking about media. Then we got ‘plagiarism,’ which is, I understand, ‘mostly vibes.’
I want to compare Davey Wreden to Fred Gallagher, the author of Megatokyo. Megatokyo if you’re not familiar with it, is a webcomic that started in August 2000 and has never officially stopped updating since. It’s updated twice this year, which puts it ahead of the same time last year. What Megatokyo is about is not important here, what is is that Megatokyo was enormously succesful, incredibly popular, and has never once had an update schedule its authors were happy with.
I wrote a lot about Megatokyo last year and I still think that article is worth restructuring and presenting in some kind of long form read way. In the end my conclusion about it is that I don’t think ill of Fred Gallagher as a creative, as much as I think that he got to suffer a unique kind of problem that only capitalism can cause, where you can be too successful to handle your own success. That is, both Wreden and Gallagher made something that led to people having assumptions and expectations that don’t make any sense, because the value of what they created was associated with capital, which is to say, money, and rent, and food.
There’s this idea we’re all circling around right now on a platform that is probably by now mostly procedurally generated – not just the stuff made in the past few years by tools like Chatgpt and the midjourney thumbnails and all, but rather that the algorithm of youtube made a lot of people make media in a way that shaved the non-formulaic parts off it, until there was nothing but hash tag con tent. The stuff you like is a small egg floating on a vast and turbulent sea of piss. It’s now that people care a lot about a kind of authenticity from work which separates it from what I’m going to call Generative Media, and which other people are going to insist on calling ‘AI.’
The conversation around generative art is a real struggle sometimes because it feels like sometimes when people are talking about ‘ai art bros’ they’re dealing with a small pool of obnoxious people, and sometimes I can even tell the specific dickhead they mean. It’s Shad, it’s Shad, so often they mean Shad, and yeah sure, Shad sucks. But the conversation around generative media is so often structured in these really weird ways that seems to imply low-quality images don’t exist until generative media gets involved. That nobody cranks out bullshit, or that art is a transferrable property of a human agent, or that in the great days of the internet, nobody’s using pictures they didn’t draw to illustrate articles they wrote. In this very video I’m using gameplay footage from a game I don’t own, and the reason you’re not seeing the footage from S1m0ne to reinforce that point is because a robot would get mad at me and block the video if I did.
I’m even in defensive crouch saying this stuff here. Look: I think generative media tools have applications, particularly in zero-value situations. Nobody in the world is having their pocket picked if I copy art of Rin Matsuoka and use that for my D&D character. Similarly, someone with less image editing skill than mine using generative media to generate pictures of things they weren’t going to pay for in the first place are not hurting anyone unless you believe in a literal cosmic value of these things. In that case, you’re basically just like the generative media people who are functionally, praying to chat gpt. If you’re rapid prototyping, if you’re making a game and need temporary assets to give yourself tools to build around, if you need a powerpoint presentation for class, all of this stuff represents no lost value. This is a perfect place to put generative media. I’m sure purists will disagree, and I just do not care. But there’s my stance: Generative media is an interesting toy that should be used as such, and if it can replace your job, your job probably sucks and you should be doing something cooler and better that people value more. That’s a problem with jobs, and how we give people money to feed themselves, not the software that generates anime tiddy on demand.
Now, here is where things get tangled up.
It seems to me that generative media is being attacked right now by people I generally like and agree with on most things, because of very high concept, seemingly contradictory positions. People who dislike copyright law busting it out to attack midjourney, and people who hate Disney praying for them to fight Google. Ideas about the inherent nobility of art and stick figure illustrations being better than generative media on websites dedicated to sharing unsourced artworks of definitely not stick figures. People don’t have reasons that make a lot of sense for why these things should not be tolerated, but they are very real about their emotional hatred of them. Which, you know, given the people who defend generative media, makes sense, a lot of those people suck and are incredibly obnoxious. Particularly it seems a lot of them are the losers of the NFT wave who are trying to get in ground level as ‘prompt engineers’ as if the ecosystem they’re entering will value them at all.
One of the most sterling arguments against generative media, and one I personally like, is the idea that these tools represent potential precarity for artists who are already struggling to pay for things like, again, rent and food. Potential, in that, largely commission-based artistic survival under capitalism seems to be a bit of a dice roll as it is. My solution to this is not to shame people who weren’t going to pay for art for failing to be able to support a commission economy they weren’t partaking in in the first place, though, it’s things like massive overhauls of income inequality and universal basic income, but also I can understand how my idea is hard and yelling at strangers in hyperbolic language is really easy.
The pressure that created the Beginner’s Guide is also the pressure that meant someone talking about an artistic work of anxiety media couched it in terms of fucking refunds so people didn’t feel they’d ethically mis-stepped by buying fiction about exploitation, a thing that nobody otherwise does, and it’s the same pressure that means ‘someone is making cheap bad art with an exploitative method’ is a threat to the livelihood of a small number of people who have managed to make an extremely precarious living doing art in the first place. As if money is why artists make art, as if we aren’t all struggling in exploitative systems, as if the existence of bland corporate art pumped out in huge troves to pad resume drawers isn’t
Since these past few years, writing academically, a habit I’ve gotten into is always trying to attribute where I get ideas for. Sentences that are referring to someone else’s idea, with the little note of ‘hey, this is that person, at this date.’ It’s a thing that can create the habit of also starting sentences with ‘Wreden says this’ or ‘Gallagher’s work shows this,’ which creates in casual conversation an impression of a very specific kind of authorial access. Certainly here on Youtube, I don’t want to give you the impression because I’m pointing to their work that I can tell you what they think or feel. The idea that I can connect to these authors through a particularly big brained reading of their work is similar to how Christians think they can read god’s mind because they read the book of Daniel, and like, Fred Gallagher exists.
I don’t know what Davey Wreden was thinking about the Beginner’s Guide when he made it. Even if I asked him now, I won’t get an answer, I’ll get the answer of what he remembers of what he was thinking, which may be the same thing but can’t necessarily. I can try, and that’s a way to get at this authenticity, but it’s not a way to guarantee it.
The Beginner’s Guide is still an interesting game to me, because the conversation around it, and around ownership of work, and of unsourced material and exploiting artists hasn’t changed that much but all the people engaging in it have gotten new things to have to try and fit into their models. We are no closer to Coda.
Those opening paragraphs of this article are from from wikipedia.